Margin analysis for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — margin analysis is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside advisory more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for margin analysis — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Margin analysis sits inside advisory, alongside Cash flow forecasting, Runway analysis, Budgeting and forecasting. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

It's the same margin math applied below the whole-company level — by product, by customer, by channel — using the reconciled ledger rather than a single blended number. The P&L gives you one average; margin analysis shows you what that average is hiding.

Most charts of accounts are built to file a tax return, not to answer "which product makes money," so sales and costs are lumped into a handful of generic accounts. Adding product, customer, or class tags is what makes a breakout possible, and for a first engagement that coding work is often the majority of the effort.

Gross margin follows the standard accounting definition — revenue minus cost of goods sold. Contribution margin strips out only the costs that move with volume and leaves fixed costs like rent or salaried overhead out of the per-unit number, which makes it the more useful figure for a pricing or volume decision even though it isn't a GAAP-defined term.

It shows you the margin picture — which product, customer, or channel is genuinely profitable and which is being subsidized — so the decision is informed. It doesn't make the call for you, and it doesn't weigh in on the tax or legal consequences of dropping a line; that's a conversation for your CPA and, where relevant, an attorney.

No, and it isn't built to. Margin analysis is management reporting about where money is made inside the business as it exists today. It doesn't recommend a tax position, an entity structure, or where to invest capital — those stay with your CPA and any licensed financial advisor.

The most common surprise is that the highest-revenue customer isn't the highest-margin one — heavy discounting or high service cost quietly erodes the account's profitability while a smaller, lower-maintenance customer turns out to be the best relationship in the book.

That's common, and it's handled by documenting the definition rather than guessing. We state in writing which costs count as variable for your specific business and apply that definition consistently, so the contribution margin number means the same thing from one period to the next.

It uses whichever method your CPA has already established — FIFO, weighted-average, or otherwise for inventory, and your existing ASC 606 treatment for revenue timing. We don't recommend changing either to produce a different margin number; that decision carries its own accounting consequences and stays with your CPA.

Typically on the same cadence as monthly close, so margin trends are visible as they develop rather than reconstructed once a year. A business with fast-moving product mix or seasonal channels may want it reviewed more often; scope is set on the initial call.

A reconciled general ledger, enough sales history to see the revenue by product or customer even if it isn't tagged yet, and visibility into direct costs (materials, labor, freight, processing fees). The first pass is usually spent turning that raw data into something that can actually be sliced.